Getting access to Social Media APIs

If you are a noob to API’s I recommend to watch one of this first : Getting started with APIs

Social Media and API

    Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications. User-generated content such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions is the lifeblood of social media. Social media also started creating APIs to share their data with third-party application developers and became source for data mining.

    There are mainly two types of APIs:
        RESTful API:
            - REST Stands for Representational State Transfer which relies on HTTP protocol for data transfer.
            - Services Provided are
                    GET: recieve data from server
                    POST: write data to the server
        Stream API:
            - Used to collect data in real time.
            - Data is similar to REST APIs

Authentication and Authorization

    Let’s say you were alone in your home, suddenly the doorbell rang. You opened the door and found that its was your friend. As it was your friend, you felt happy and invited him into your home. Now think about what are the things he can use? can he enter you bedroom or eat something in your kitchen that is made for you? Will you allow him to do so? What if it’s not your friend and some stranger?
Here your home is an API and the visitor is an user.

    Authentication is an act of validating the user. Usernames, Passwords, One-time pins(OTP), Authentication apps, Biometrics, etc are some authentication factors.
    Authorization is a process of giving the user permission to access a specific resource. In order to authorize one must be authenticated.

Now let’s see some practical implementations

Necessary Libraries

import os
import json
import requests
import webbrowser

import tweepy

from requests_oauthlib import OAuth1

In a situation when you want your variables to be kept secret to the other users, the python library dotenv is very useful.

Global Variables

# loading  environmental vars
from dotenv import load_dotenv

folder_path = os.path.expanduser('../data/')  
load_dotenv(os.path.join(folder_path, '.env'))

True  

AUTHENTICATION

    Tweepy makes it easier to use the twitter streaming api by handling authentication, connection, creating and destroying the session, reading incoming messages, and partially routing messages.

consumer_key = os.getenv("TWITTER_API_KEY")
consumer_secret = os.getenv("TWITTER_API_SECRET")

callback_URL = "oob"

oauth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret, callback_URL)

redirect_URL = oauth.get_authorization_url()

webbrowser.open(redirect_URL)

True  

    After running the above code you will be redirected to this page as shown below

click the authorize button and then you will be provided with a pin as shown below

saving the pin for future use

PIN = input("Enter the PIN: ")

Enter the PIN: 9210359

Using the pin above we can get the access token and the access secret as shown below

access_token, access_secret = oauth.get_access_token(PIN)

Extracting data

    Let’s collect some tweets from our API

# url's
url = "https://api.Twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json"

# parameters
qry = "premier league -filter:retweets AND -filter:replies"
pms = {"q" : qry, "count" : 100, "lang" : "en", 
       "result_type": "recent"}

auth = OAuth1(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, access_secret)

res = requests.get(url, params = pms, auth=auth)

tweets = res.json()

for status in tweets["statuses"][:10]:
    print(status["text"])
    print("--------------------------------")

Man city will win again,looking for partners, new premier league champion medals. https://t.co/02d8FzEtZ9
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#Terry and #Carvalho be the greatest CB partnership for the Premier League history.

•Dem concede only15 goals in 3… https://t.co/Y9Yyw9XEUv
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There’s no Premier League this weekend so instead we’ve previewed three international games, with odds from… https://t.co/p0zUdT7PGQ
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How hard is it for every premier league player to put 1% of their wages forward to a group who will work on feeding… https://t.co/V2pGOcb40f
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LIVE: Nile Special Stout Rugby Premier League Matchday Four #NileStoutRugby 
https://t.co/bIhZP8HnLl
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GOAL! Blackburn U18 in England Premier League U18
Middlesbrough U18 0-1 Blackburn U18
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Weekend without premier league everything become difficult am even falling in love just 14 hours am in love 🙄🤸‍♂️🤸‍♂️🤸‍♂️
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There is no Premier League this weekend and I hate it.
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Never Miss The Action With https://t.co/Z4GIY7IONU
Catch The Indian Premier League - Starting Starting 07 April 202… https://t.co/X8FISJYuW4
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Man Utd legend Sir Alex Ferguson admits some of his transfers ‘weren  👨 #cristianoronaldo #siralexferguson https://t.co/n23i26VMdl
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Various APIs have various ways to authenticate. They may differ in their endpoint url’s, parameters, queries provided, etc. But the process is same as follows.